Let’s face it, we all have made at least one mistake in our lives.
Just like all the people who spent $100+ on minidiscs players in the early noughties, Apple revolutionized the market months before launching the first iPod.
It’s not surprising that so many people prefer to do their research before making a commitment.
According to Ipsos and Google, 53 percent of shoppers do their research before making a purchase in order to make the best decision.
It is inevitable that much of the product research will be done online in an age where digital channels are used by 87 percent of shoppers to begin their product searches.
It is in your best interests to help shoppers find the right product.
Buyer’s guides are here to help.
7 Examples of the Best Buyer’s Guide
What is a Buyer’s guide?
1. Wayfair
2. REI
3. Best Buy
4. B&H Video
5. John Lewis
6. JB HiFi
7. Dyson
What is a Buyer’s guide?
A buyer’s guide provides all the information customers need to make an informed buying decision.
This information could include:
Price. What should shoppers spend on a product such as this? Are these one-off costs or recurring? What is the size of these products? What materials are they made of? Are there any advantages to using one material over the other? What sort of features do products in this category include?Product-specific functionality. Are there key features that some products possess that others lack? “Vs.” comparisons. Are you wired or wireless? Portable or desktop? Metal or wood? These are key A/B-style choices that are often made early in the purchasing process.
You can create buyer’s guides for any product category that you can imagine. They are more common for high-end items such as furniture and electronics.
I don’t likely need much advice if I’m purchasing a new kitchen scourer, or socks. If I spend a lot of money on a TV, however, I would appreciate some advice.
To help you see how buying guides could work in your ecommerce content strategy, here are seven examples of real buyer’s guides.
1. Wayfair
Wayfair offers a vast library of educational content. Buyer’s guides are a major part of this collection. You can find everything you need, from blenders to fondue pans.
We’re going to look at the guide of a homeware and furniture store to purchasing a pizza oven.
Wayfair doesn’t waste any words. It is happy to get straight to the important stuff, but it does spend a few sentences “setting the scene”.
Wayfair’s outdoor cooking solutions can be expensive and time-consuming, so this works well.
The pizza oven is a simple and inexpensive way to prepare food outside.
Wayfair also makes the right use of CTAs throughout its body copy. Wayfair outlines the different considerations when choosing an outdoor pizza oven in the second section, just after the introduction.
Wayfair includes a CTA at each step to take you to the relevant product category page. This allows Wayfair to include more links within the article and gives the content a commercial focus.
A buyer’s guide does not contain only informational content. It is about explaining the customer’s needs and then pointing them to the relevant products.
2. REI
REI, like Wayfair has a vast content library. REI’s buying guides are listed under the “Expert Advice” heading, which lends them credibility and authority.
This is more than just a list of product recommendations. You will also find useful tips and tricks from experts. Reviews are a great way to reinforce this point in each buyer’s guide.
Each guide comes with a star rating. Readers are asked to rate the article once they’re done.
This means that at least 225 people also found REI’s guide to buying a hammock useful.
This approach makes REI’s content more trustworthy, as half of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations from family and friends.
This buyer’s guide isn’t the only thing I like about it. The guide makes good use of rich media, including an explainer video that explains some of the main considerations when buying a hammock and other products you may want to purchase alongside it.
This video is just over one minute long, making it a quick introduction to the topic. If buyers need more information, they will be able to access the remainder of the guide.
3. Best Buy
Best Buy is a leading supplier of more than 40 billion dollars worth products each year. This shows that it knows a lot about how to convert customers.
Buyer’s guides are a crucial part of a company’s content strategy. It doesn’t bother to produce buyer’s guides for everything, unlike other brands that I looked at while researching this article.
It focuses instead on product categories shoppers are most likely have questions about, such as smart speakers, streaming media players, and computer storage.
Activity and health trackers are definitely in the “products that may require a little explanation before i’m ready to buy”.
Best Buy makes it easy to choose a health tracker by explaining the basics and why you might pick each one.
It keeps the copy largely free from CTAs.
A call to action can be made at any time. If the customer is ready and willing to buy, this is your chance to guide them in the right direction. If they have any questions, they don’t want to be repeatedly told to “buy now.”
A navigation bar at the top is another smart feature of this buying guide:
This allows you to quickly refer to a previous section to recall a key piece or jump to a later section when you need something more specific.
4. B&H Video
B&H is North America’s largest retailer of video equipment and photography. They offer buyer’s guides for six product categories: video, pro audio and computers.
Let’s take a look at the retailer’s buying guide for vlogging cameras to find out what’s happening.
The best thing about this guide? Each product comes with a bullet-point list of features.
It pulls out the key information making it easy to find. Let’s face it, not everyone has time or patience to read through hundreds of pages of copy in order to find the right product for them.
My favorite part about the guide is B&H’s decision to include a scrollable listing of all featured products.
This list is at the end of the article. Once you have all the information needed to purchase the best vlogging camera, you will be presented with a list listing all the accessories and cameras you have just read.
Another minor point. We can see at the top of this guide when the article was last updated.
This is a trust factor as it indicates that the information you’re about to read has been updated. Brands will find it useful to remind them that content creation is not a one-and done thing.
After you have published your buyer’s guides, it is a good idea to renew the content every few month to keep it relevant. Google loves “fresh” content (e.g. Recent or new content.
5. John Lewis
The majority of the examples in this article are gear-oriented, with some technical aspects. Not all buying guides have to be technical.
John Lewis, a department store chain, offers a great example of a buyer’s guide to help shoppers select the right suit.
It’s admittedly a bit less detailed than some of the other buying guides I have seen. It’s still full of valuable information.
This “checklist”, which appears in the guide’s early chapters, is a particularly effective element.
It explains in four steps how to determine if a suit is a good fit.
As with most tech products, buying a suit can be complicated. The guide also explains terminology such as birdseye and pick and choose that might not make sense to inexperienced suit buyers.
6. JB HiFi
To return to tech, JB Hi-Fi, an Australian home entertainment retailer, has a smaller content library that most of the others in this article. It does however know what a buyer’s guide is.
It doesn’t try too hard to be everything. This is perhaps my favorite aspect of its TV buying guide. It is 100 percent focused on education and not recommending products.
This guide is full of helpful advice.
It was a very scientific process, and I honestly didn’t know it.
JB Hi-Fi’s purchasing guide is, unsurprisingly, purely informative. It doesn’t refer to any specific products nor include any “buy now” CTAs. It instead contains a prominent call-to-action that links to JB HiFi’s TV finder tool.
This method works well: Once you have all the information you need in order to make an informed decision, you can click on the TV finder to answer the questions and get the best device for you.
This is a classic example where the customer “closing” the deal for themselves.
7. Dyson
Dyson is at the forefront of household technology, from hair straighteners and air purifiers to name a few.
It’s natural that consumers won’t always be able to understand your products immediately if you are constantly trying to innovate and push the boundaries. This is especially true if multiple products fall within the same category.
Dyson created a buyer’s guide to its entire range of vacuum cleaners in an attempt to overcome this problem. The product descriptions are concise and easy to read, so that customers can easily understand which vacuum cleaner is right for them.
Dyson’s buying guide is similar to JB Hi-Fi. It doesn’t try to close the deal. Instead, the CTA points to Dyson’s range of accessories for cleaning tasks and encourages readers to make their own decision about which model they want.
Conclusion
We’ve seen that there is no standard format for a buyer’s guide.
Each of these examples shares one thing: simplicity.
It would be easy to overload a buying guide with product-specific details and detailed information. It’s better to save that information for your product pages.
Your buyer’s guide’s job is not to provide every detail a customer could need about any product in a particular category.
It’s all about providing enough information to enable them to make informed decisions and then guiding them towards the appropriate category page.
Sleeknote’s 7 Brilliant Buyer’s Reference Examples You Can Copy appeared first in Sleeknote
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By: Emil Kristensen
Title: 7 Brilliant Buyer’s Guide Examples You Can Copy
Sourced From: sleeknote.com/blog/buyers-guide-examples
Published Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 09:34:10 +0000
Did you miss our previous article…
https://onlinemarketingagencies.net/content-marketing-guidelines-why-and-how-to-make-them/
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